Jeld-Wen Field will be jammed Sunday for the second leg of the MLS Western Conference finals between the Portland Timbers and Real Salt Lake.

The Timbers have played host to 52 consecutive sellouts since joining the league, creating a rocking, rollicking atmosphere unparalleled in this market.

The fans themselves are part of the show, which might be one reason Major League Soccer hasn’t gained much traction in the national television ratings.

The Sports Business Journal recently noted that ratings for the WNBA’s regular-season games were higher than for regular-season games in MLS, although the headline was sexier than the fine print.

You had to wade into the body of the story to discover weekday WNBA games were telecast in primetime, while the MLS games were scattered all over the TV grid and all around the clock.

Still, television viewership numbers are a sore point for league officials, who point to a whole host of reasons. Among them:

• There isn’t a regular day and time to build a television audience around the way the NFL did it with Sunday afternoons and Monday Night Football.

• MLS doesn’t get the talking-head treatment that, say, college football does on ESPN's "College GameDay". GameDay is a three-hour promo for the day’s games that sets up story lines and drums up interest.

• Soccer tends to be best when viewed communally, and packed backer bars don’t register in the ratings.

• MLS zealously has protected its paying customers, and been disinclined to allow flex scheduling. With flex scheduling, television can wait until the last minute to decide which game to broadcast, and make late changes to start times to fill programming needs.

Whatever the rationale or the rationalization, it’s clear MLS doesn’t have much of a TV footprint.

Television viewership in the playoffs is better than it was last year, but that isn’t saying much. The Portland-Seattle conference semifinal series averaged 213,000 viewers, up 50 percent from 2012, and probably would have been higher yet had not the second leg of the series been head-up against the Oregon-Stanford football game.

Therein lies the issue. For all its worldwide popularity, soccer is a niche sport in the U.S. It can’t stand on its own with the big boys in the U.S. spectator sports market.

Even regular-season college football games on ESPNU average more than 440,000 viewers and pulverize the MLS playoffs in the ratings. ESPNU is college football’s low-rent district. It’s safe to say games like Alabama-Auburn never appear on ESPNU.

Dan Courtemanche, MLS’s executive vice president for communications, points to an independent study that found more than 60 million soccer fans in the U.S. But a soccer fan isn’t necessarily an MLS fan. U.S. broadcasts of English Premier League games easily have outdrawn the MLS.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether any of this matters inside Jeld-Wen when Diego Valeri breaks into the clear with the ball, when the Timbers Army is roaring, when the chainsaw is revving, when everybody in attendance, men and women, adults and children, young and old are on their feet.

It’s over-the-top fun. No telecast, no matter how slickly produced, can capture what it’s like to be there.

MLS currently is negotiating for a new national television package to take effect in 2015. Flex scheduling is on the table, and let’s hope the league doesn’t give away the best part of the sport in the bargaining process.

College football has done that. The Pac-12 totally surrendered control over its football schedule in exchange for $3 billion so conference schools can make head coaches rich and build football complexes as opulent as the Hearst Castle.

Fans who actually attend the games have become an afterthought, often not knowing until somewhere between six days and two weeks before kickoff whether a game will be played in the morning, afternoon or evening.

MLS doesn’t need to go down that path. It can own its own niche.

The league averages more than 18,000 per game while playing in compact, mostly soccer-specific stadiums. It has an intensely loyal base. If a large percentage of fans of traditional U.S. sports don’t get it, if TV audiences stay low, well, maybe the league is better that way.

In this country, anyway, maybe professional soccer belongs outside the mainstream and inside the stadium.